Simply put, worked on something for a little bit, shut down computer and slept, and the next day I can’t open the thing I’ve been working on without Pencil 2D stopping to work. Pencil will still open other files, but not the one I worked on previously.

Does this happen often?

I’m using the Nightly build on Windows 10.

I also can’t locate the file where all my pngs are saved to with the pcxls. The FAQ said they should be next to the pcxls, but I can’t finds 'em.

Help with anything would be great, and sorry if this issue has been posted somewhere before/ wrong place to post this. I’m new don’t killz me

To be honest there has been similar reports, but is not related to the Nightly Build, it appears to be related to how Pencil2D manages memory. It seems there’s an uber critical bug that flushes all the drawings and the file away corrupting the files and making them unusable, however this has happened only to people that have files with more than 200 frames and were using PCL files (which come with the external folder by default)

To clear some doubts the FAQ only says that “PCL” files create the folders, not PCLX. Newer Pencil2D has two filetypes, legacy files with are PCL, and new type PCLX. I’ll try to change it over the FAQ to make it clearer later though.

PCLX files store the bitmap / vector / sound information inside the file as opposed to an external folder. The downside to this file seems to be that the more images, frames or layers you have, the bigger the file will be, so if you had a lot of frames in the file, that might explain why the app is crashing before you can open it.

In summary, backup your Pencil files (either PCL or PCLX) often in different places, who knows what sort of wacky behaviour will come up next. Sigh.

The only thing I can ask of you is to send over the file for closer inspection, you could use a file upload service like mega.nz or if you have a google drive or dropbox account upload them there and share a public link so I can test it. Any findings will be reported to the developers, however I don’t really know if this is something that can be fixed as easily.

@goody2shoos Hey, sorry I didn’t get back to you again I’ve been busy. Anyway I tried opening your file with the newest version I had (March 2016) as well as the one from (January 2016) and indeed it crashed.

However I went far back up to a version from November 2015 and it opened! yay~ I’ll try to collect this information so maybe we can improve on the pclx format so problems like this won’t bother us anymore.

By the way as a side note the drawings were adorable! Do you have a tumblr or something? would love to see more of your work if that’s ok!, either way pray for some more volunteers to drop by and help us out, we need all the help we can get haha xD, have a great week and take care!

Thank you for the compliment! At the moment, I do not have any internet outlets for any of my artwork, but I could set up something quick like Imgur.

I have a few unfinished things to show that I drew in Pencil, but most of my work is drawn on paper with a mechanical pencil. So unless you don’t mind phone camera quality pictures of graphite, those won’t be shown anytime soon.

I’ll reply with a link to the artwork when I set it up. Thanks again for your interest!

@goody2shoos Nah it’s really cool. Good job on the work! The spine scene doesn’t feel gory at all, so no offense taken if that was a concern haha.

Also bonus points for using Blender :P, just in case I’ll have you know there are a few animators who are developing the Grease Pencil function to make it more robust and apt for 2D animation, In case you wanna see what they’re already capable of, take a look at the main artist’s (Daniel Lara) grease pencil related vimeo channel: